The usual grumblings attend the day on which we commemorate the most famous illegal immigrant in the history of the Americas, an undocumented wanderer from Spain who brought plagues, fire and the sword from the Old World to the New.
Columbus Day is our most confused holiday celebration, one in which the public understanding of the day has shifted the farthest from the intent of those who instituted the observance. Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World on October 12, 1492 only became a federal holiday in the US in 1934 since the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1971 we have celebrated it on the Monday closes to the actual date; Veterans’ Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Fourth of July escaped the leveling axe and are still celebrated on their actual dates.
There is a long history of celebrating the European discovery of the Americas outside the United States. Many South American and Caribbean countries began celebrating the day as a celebration of Latino ethnic identity well before Columbus Day made it onto the holiday calendar in the US; Venezuela now celebrates it as the Day of Indigenous Resistance. In Spain the day on which an Italian discovered what we now know as the Bahamas under the impression he was nearing Japan was long celebrated as Dia de la Hispanidad.
In American history, the fight to make a holiday on Columbus Day actually had almost nothing to do with the actual arrival of Christopher Columbus in the western hemisphere. It wasn’t about celebrating the European conquest of the Americas or the extirpation of the native tribes.
The day was made a holiday after years of lobbying as a way of recognizing the contribution of Roman Catholics and immigrants generally to American life. It is a holiday to celebrate diversity, not to commemorate the imperial outreach of Ferdinand and Isabella, a deeply regrettable couple who were notorious oath breakers, inquisitors and anti-Semites.
